In today's market, the operations of companies move at a much faster pace than in the past due to increasing technological advances, specifically in the field of information exchange and data management. It is common practice for companies to establish relationships with each other and engage in a manner that incorporates the cooperative use of data. In furthering the relationship between companies and their respective interests, it is often necessary to transfer information and data from one company to another. In many instances the data existing on a database or network of one company may not conform in structure or format with the database or network of the other company. As such, it is often the unenviable task of an internal Information Technology (IT) Department to transform acquired data such that the data can exist on its database or network in a manner consistent with the already existing data.
Furthermore, lack of a structured, consistent approach for transforming data often creates risk of implementation errors and delays in project delivery due to unexpected results during a test phase. For example, computer code is usually developed by a company to provide instructions on how to transform data to comport with the receiving company's database or network. However, errors in code design or execution can significantly delay the use of the transferred data because, for example, the error must be corrected and the entire transformation of the data re-executed.
In an effort to minimize problematic transfer of the desired data, a company can mitigate significant administrative costs by first working with smaller, transferred test files. These test files are typically comprised of test data as a limited precursor for the entire database log. This limited data is then manipulated and tested to confirm the adequacy of the algorithms used to transform the data to the format of the receiving company's database.
In this sense, the company can utilize their resources and control costs in a more efficient manner.
In the past, a company may receive a test file when it wished to implement a new or modified business relationship with another company. But notably, a typical company's internal systems do not typically follow a structured or consistent testing effort with other companies. One reason for the lack of structured testing is that it usually included significant, time consuming, and often superfluous coordination with companies selected for certain projects. In an effort to alleviate this excessive coordination, a structured, consistent, repetitive method is needed to preemptively identify the desired data information, devise a process to transform the data, and test this transforming process on test data received from an outside company. In this fashion, errors in the transformation can be readily identified and corrected before the entire data log is transformed. As such, the costly process of trial and error of numerous computer code corrections, which is commonly used for the data transformation process and manipulation of the large, acquired databases, can be minimized or eliminated.